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As program director for Computers in Libraries 2017, March 28-30 in DC, I have delivered the program to Information Today, the producer of the conference. The program with sessions and workshops should be online in a few weeks and you should receive your snail mail copy after that! In the meantime, our theme is Upping Our Game: Taking Libraries to New Heights with Technology and here’s a few early highlights to peak your interest:

new full day Searchers Academy workshop on Mon Mar 27 with many other half day workshops on change management, grant seeking, outcome measures, putting a press room on your website, hands-on video lessons, makerspaces, library tech update, engaging teens, Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure and apps, innovation, fundraising, monitoring tools & dashboards, tech trends, UX, security, and more! popular Games & Gadgets networking & fun evening on Mon Mar 27 Opening keynote speaker Gina Milsap, CEO, Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library, Library Journal Library of the Year in 2016 on Tues Mar 28 New full day streams/tracks of sessions on funding strategies & practices as well as upping our marketing game a talk about winning with Pokemon Go in a special library co-located Library Leaders Summit on the topic of Future Proofing Libraries with terrific speakers & lots of time for discussion with your colleagues put the dates in your new 2017 calendar & stay tuned for lots more exciting topics and speakers!

Just saw this 2010 vid again from Internet Librarian keynote speaker alumni, Howard Rheingold. I knew him before the early days of the Internet, when he was focused on communities, and always love to listen to his ideas and thoughts. I love this piece on critical thinking around the Net/or as he calls it, crap detection.

He believed in 2010, and I think still relevant today, that we need to go beyond skills to literacies:

Skills, literacies and search engines help to search credibilities, but I think we as librarians, need to push our knowledge of credibility, crap detection, and trust by the public. I look forward to lots of discussions around this topic at Internet Librarian 2016, Oct 17-19 in Monterey CA especially at our Tues evening program celebrating Internet Librarian’s 20th anniversary and “Looking Forward Retrospectively”. And watch the conference website for a link to post your favorite Internet Librarian memory, picture, link, etc.

We are very excited to have Indi Young as a keynote speaker for Internet Librarian 2016 on Monday Oct 17th in Monterey CA. When I saw Nate Hill at a recent conference, he commented on how lucky we were to have her! Indi is also leading a workshop on stellar UX at the conference on Sunday Oct 16th!

Indi got her start as a software engineer with a computer science degree. She was a founder of Adaptive Path in 2001, a pioneer in user experience design. She has written two books: Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior and Practical Empathy: For Collaboration and Creativity in Your Work. She blogs. Here’s more info about Indi.

Indi does “research for organizations about the people they hope to support. [She] helps them think beyond “users” and beyond “user research,” gaining clarity instead about which problems to solve, which segments of people to support, where the gaps are, and how to branch services and products. [She] helps clients curate and add to this roadmap through the decades.”

Make sure you sign up for her workshop and hear her keynote speech at Internet Librarian 2016!

This email hit my desk today and it really resonated with me as I work with and talk with so many who have difficulty proving their value and impact. It also addresses the financial industry where my roots are! The highlights below are mine but the text is not.

Monetizing Information Flows

StreetContxt is a hot, Canadian-based start-up that just raised $8 million from A-list investors, including a number of big banks and brokerage houses. Its mission is simple: to maximize the value of the mountain of investment research that gets generated each year. But what really makes StreetContxt stand out to me is that it offers a very compelling business proposition to both those who create the research and those who use it.

For the sell-side (those who create the content), it’s currently difficult to measure the impact much less the ROI on the huge volume of research they create annually. They send it out to presumably interested and qualified recipients, with no way of knowing if it is acted on, or even viewed.

For the buy-side (those who receive and use the content), it’s impossible to keep up with the blizzard of information being pushed out to them. Even more significantly, some of this research is very good, but a lot of it isn’t. How do you identify the good stuff?

StreetContxt offers the sell-side a powerful intelligence platform. By distributing research through StreetContxt, research producers can learn exactly who viewed their research and whether it was forwarded

Did you know that O’Reilly has published the 4th edition of this seminal work, Information Architecture: for the Web and Beyond, by Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld first published in 1998? Terrific! And I just got my copy. The first section introduces IA with definitions and issues then discusses design for finding and for understanding. Part 2 covers the basic principles of IA including organization systems, labeling systems, navigating systems, search systems as well as thesauri, controlled vocabularies & metadata. Peter is a wonderful teacher and speaker about these topics for librarians, info pros, taxonomists, and knowledge managers. He will be participating in Library Leaders Digital Strategy Summit at the DC Hilton, March 8-9.

I’m very excited about the next year’s Computers in Libraries 2016, March 8-10 in Washington DC. First, #CILDC is 31 years strong! And still highlighting innovative technology and library practices, sharing leading-edge information services and community engagement strategies as well as looking at the impact these services and practices have on their communities.

Many organizations have innovation labs, incubating spaces, and ways to stimulate imagination and support research. Our theme for Computers in Libraries 2016, Library Labs: Research, Innovation, & Imagination, aims to do the following: • Highlight library research that translates into useful strategies and practices for libraries. • Share new and exciting projects from information industry labs. • Feature innovative services and libraries. • Stretch our imagination with possible areas for further library research and testing.

Games, Gadgets & Makerspaces: Welcome & Networking Event from 5.30 to 7.30 with refreshments is a popular meeting, learning, and networking event. Includes lots of gamers and gadget lovers and is definitely an evening of fun, playing, learning, and networking. See how you can transform your thinking,

There is still time to register at Internet Librarian 2015 in lovely Monterey, California; October 25th – 28th. If you haven’t registered yet, be sure you do to check out some of these Internet Librarian exclusive events:

This year join Nate Hill, Tod Colegrove, and Brian Pichman as they launch an entire interactive workshop on Makerspaces, Idea Labs, and Hackerspaces. Joining them are individuals from littleBits, Hopscotch, LightUp, Twenty One Toys, Brown Dog Gadgets, and more. Get a chance to not only talk about makerspaces, build strategies for success, but also get a chance to play with some leading edge technology that is featured in makerspaces around the world. Learn about code writing, engineering, learning by failure all in this full day jam packed workshop. This workshop offers an opportunity to collaborate with other start-ups and help build your library into an incubation space for start-up culture.

Looking for something to do Sunday night? Join in on the first ever Games and Gadget night hosted in part with Monday Morning’s Opening Keynote Panelists. Get an opportunity to talk to Ilana Ben-Ari, founder of the innovative way to learn empathy and failure from her company called Twenty One Toys. Have a chance to meet Erin Mulcahy who manages the strategic initiatives of littleBits education. Talk to her about prototyping and creating using circuits to help foster innovation in your library space. Explore programming with Liza Conrad, head of community and partnerships

Just watched this great video of John Cruikshank, Publisher, Toronto Star which screamed libraries to me — looking at new ways to reach people, in particular young people. Here’s a few snippets, but do watch it!

future of news — engage a broad audience print newspaper still there and making a profit $25 million start with ipad newsroom focused on storytelling re-engage people in a digital world at a deeper level, immersive level video capacity huge, far more graphical — different way of approaching the news agena bringing it to another generation in a different way can tell marketers how long people spend on their add & if they interact with it

I can’t believe it is now September which begins the busy fall events for libraries. Here’s some exciting events, one on the east coast and lots of the west coast, that I want to share with you and hope to see you participate!

If you are attending Computers in Libraries in Washington DC next week, you should check out Games, Gadgets, and Makerspaces on Sunday, April 26th from 5:30-7:30PM. Brian Pichman, Director of Strategic Innovation for the Evolve Project, is bringing the attendees of CIL a chance to experience all the latest and greatest in innovative technology. Come for refreshments, laughs, and a quick tutorial on how to build robots, circuits, 3D print, code, and so much more! Within minutes, you will be creating and making.

Along with Brian are several special guests: Ginger Butcher from NASA, Joshua Zimmerman from Brown Dog Gadgets, and Tod Colegrove and team from University of Nevada – Reno.

Ginger will be building NASA activities with the littleBits components. In 2014, she worked with littleBits Electronics to co-develop NASA activities to accompany their commercial Space Kit product. These activities are excellent springboards for engaging kids in science both in formal and informal education settings.

Joshua invites you to come create your own custom light up name tag courtesy of BrownDogGadgets.com. Etch your name into an acrylic blank and light it up with colorful LEDs. This simple project is just one of many hands-on electronics projects designed for young learners. Joshua will be sharing some of his other fun activities that are extremely affordable and engaging.

Tod will be showing off augmented reality through the Oculus Rift , displaying open source computer boards called, and much more! If you want to chance to experiment with some extremely high tech